Essential Proust

TRANSLATIONSRemembrance of Things Past, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff. This is the exquisite-looking 12-volume set that you can still buy second-hand. T.S.Eliot said that he thought Scott Moncrieff was superior to the original. The more common suggestion is that he is a touch more purple. This version done in the 1920s (Moncrieff died translating Proust and didn't live to do the last volume) predates the definitive text of the Pleiade edition but there is no doubt with Scott Moncrieff, in texture as much as substance, that we are in the vicinity of a literary masterpiece. Until very recently this was the basis of all other translations.

A supple meticulous revision by the Irish literary editor of The Observer that ensures the text is accurate and that Scott Moncrieff is modernised where he needs to be. Very handsome in its 1981 hardback three-volume edition. Both cheap and attractive in its three-volume white-spined Penguin edition, which is no longer available.

In Search Lost Time, Scott Moncrieff and Kilmartin revised by D.J. Enright.Various editions, the most attractive of which is the four-volume boxed set published in the Everyman edition with its black and cream covers and acid-free paper which is probably a better buy for about $200 than the various paperbacks which are not cheap. This is the most up-to-date revision of Proust that retains the melodiousness and period feel of Moncrieff and is highly recommended.

In Search of Lost Time, translated by various hands.Proust is great in any translation though it's a pity this new Penguin version by a team of translators didn't acquire an overall final polish in the direction of consistency. Lydia Davis' translation of Swann's Way looks impressive. The very finest of these translations appears to be Carol Clark's translation of The Fugitive. That's the one Proustians should have a look at.

BOOKSHoward Moss, Proust's Magic Lantern.The one indispensable book about Proust which works wonderfully because it works so modestly, by a principle of summary and reverence. By the New Yorker editor.

Edmund Wilson, Axel's Castle.The famous near contemporary English-language judgement. Magisterial but in some ways unsympathetic to what is most Proustian about Proust.

Harry Levin, The Gates of Horn.Proust in the context of French realism and its high and mighty tradition.

Walter Benjamin, Illuminations.A wonderful empathic essay by the great German critic which goes some way towards matching in texture Proust himself.

Gerard Genette, Metonymy in Proust.The most thorough and brilliant of of Proust's structuralist interpretations.

Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs.Airy and challenging. It has the advantage of Richard Howard's translations from Proust.

George Painter, Marcel Proust.One of the greatest of 20th-century biographies, beautifully written and organised.

Yves Tadie, Marcel Proust.Tadie is the supreme patriarch of Proust scholars who seems to know Proust by heart and to echo him throughout these grey and marbled pages which will be treasured by scholars.

Edmund White, Proust: A Short Life.Terse, tight and not very Proust-like, though it does the trick.